Chapter 12: THAT BASTARD

By the following morning, Sio had discovered that Arch’s promise to leave the examinations until tomorrow had been painfully literal.

Breakfast had barely settled before the long table in the study disappeared beneath equipment. Books had been moved to the floor beside one leg, two travel cases stood open beneath the window, and the cleared surface now held a collection of instruments that bore little resemblance to anything Sio had seen inside the Nexus. Some looked professionally manufactured, though old enough that their metal had dulled around the edges. Others appeared to have been repaired so many times that Sio could no longer tell which parts had originally belonged together.

Arch secured a thin band around his wrist and adjusted two small contacts against the skin. "Try leaving your fingers relaxed. Every time something across the room catches your attention, your hand tightens and the reading moves with you."

Sio deliberately loosened them, although his eyes had already wandered toward the maps covering the wall behind Arch. Morning light had made the handwritten routes even easier to see. Some crossed entire countries in faded ink. Others disappeared into mountain regions Sio knew only from travel books, accompanied by notes that seemed considerably more personal than anything a proper map should contain.

"You put someone who has wanted to travel his entire life in a room covered with routes through all five continents, then expect him to spend the morning staring at his wrist. I think some responsibility belongs to the examiner."

Arch had been writing in a compact notebook beside the device. He stopped long enough to regard Sio over his glasses, apparently deciding how much patience the observation deserved. "Most people become easier to examine after nearly being killed."

"I seem to have developed in the opposite direction. Nearly dying created several questions."

The older man’s attention drifted toward the notebook Sio had filled with three pages about the previous two days, including enough crossed-out lines and cramped additions in the margins to make the original notes difficult to follow. Sio noticed where he was looking and pulled it slightly closer to himself.

"The number is still developing," he admitted.

Arch gave a quiet sound of resignation and returned to the reading.

Sio had already spent much of breakfast asking where the house actually stood, whether every door inside it could become one of Arch’s passages, how far those passages reached, whether he needed to have visited a destination first and whether opening one onto a moving ship would create problems. At one point he had also asked about opening a door underwater, mostly because the question had occurred to him and refusing to ask felt wasteful.

Arch had answered selectively enough that Sio had begun to suspect silence itself was part of the man’s ability. Questions about Silas were different. Arch did not answer every one of those either, but he rarely ignored them completely.

When the metal band finally came away, Sio rubbed the faint indentation around his wrist and pointed toward a route drawn across western Zephyrus. "You wrote something beside that ridge about never trusting Talvar during the rains. I’ve been looking at it since yesterday, and I still don’t know who Talvar was, why you trusted him the first time, or how terrible the result had to be before you decided future versions of yourself needed a warning."

Arch checked the skin beneath the band before putting the device aside. "Talvar was a guide your father found. Silas liked him because he claimed he knew a route that would remove four days from our journey. I disliked him because he made that claim while looking at the wrong mountain."

Sio straightened enough that Arch immediately placed a hand against his forearm to keep him from disturbing the next instrument. "Dad still followed him after that?"

"Your father had a dangerous habit of treating confidence as evidence whenever the confident person happened to agree with him." Arch positioned Sio’s arm beneath a cloudy plate mounted in a repaired brass frame. The irritation in his voice had softened around the memory. "We lost the road during the first night of rain, spent two days inside an abandoned grain shed, and discovered afterward that Talvar had never crossed the ridge himself. Silas responded by trying to convince me that I had recommended him."

Sio laughed hard enough that Arch had to pull the plate back and wait for him to settle.

The story was tiny compared with everything Sio wanted to know about his father. That was probably why it mattered. Mira had given him pieces of Silas throughout childhood, but most carried the shadow of what had happened before Sio was born. She remembered his kindness, his stubbornness, the way he protected them, the man she lost in the garden. Arch remembered someone who followed the wrong guide into a storm and then tried to rewrite the decision afterward.

"Mum said he was terrible at lying," Sio said once Arch trusted him to hold still again. "Apparently he thought every extra detail made the story safer."

The cloudy plate began developing a faint discoloration along one edge while Arch’s expression took on the weariness of someone remembering an old personal burden. "Silas could begin with a broken cart and somehow end ten minutes later with two merchants, a missing horse and a village festival nobody had asked about. Eventually you stopped challenging him because every question produced another person who hadn’t existed when the story began."

Sio could almost imagine it.

For nineteen years, his father had lived in other people’s memories. Arch was the first person Sio had met who made those memories feel less preserved and more lived in, and that did nothing useful for his ability to stop asking questions.

He watched the shifting color beneath the glass while wondering aloud whether Silas had travelled because of Nexus work or because he genuinely enjoyed it. Before Arch finished examining the plate, Sio had also managed to mention that Mira remembered Silas leaving with too few clothes and returning with objects nobody had requested, then worked his way back toward whether Silas had ever learned anything about Arch’s doors.

Arch lowered the plate and inspected the result against the light. "Silas enjoyed travelling considerably more than he enjoyed preparing to travel. That distinction made him everybody else’s problem. As for my doors, he could walk through them like anyone else. You are very obviously trying to learn about my ability through questions about your father."

"I wasn’t hiding it. I thought the transition was smooth."

Arch’s expression suggested otherwise, and Sio accepted the failure with enough amusement that there was little point arguing.

The examination continued in much the same fashion, Arch working steadily while Sio explored whatever parts of the room his eyes could reach. A shell tucked between two medical volumes had come from Thalassia, though Arch refused to explain why that particular shell had survived decades of moves. The weathered climbing hooks near the window had indeed been used in Zephyrus. A broken compass apparently belonged to a story too long for the morning, which Sio quietly stored under things to ask again later.

When he returned once more to the mechanics of the doors, Arch informed him that giving detailed ability advice to somebody who had already spent two days experimentally pushing himself through unknown spatial openings would be irresponsible.

Sio disliked the answer because it was annoyingly difficult to challenge.

Eventually Arch moved most of the newer equipment aside and brought the shallow ceramic bowl between them. He filled it from a narrow bottle, added several drops of clear liquid and rotated the bowl until one of the faded markings along the rim faced him. A dark repair crossed the ceramic near the base, suggesting it had travelled almost as much as its owner.

Sio considered it carefully. "I’m beginning to think your definition of equipment includes anything you’ve kept long enough."

"It has outlived several machines designed to replace it, so show some respect." Arch positioned Sio’s left hand beside the bowl without letting the skin touch the water. His tone lost some of the dry irritation as he concentrated. "Yesterday’s scanner kept demanding a location from your Scar. We already know that achieved very little. This time I want to see what changes around the signature instead. Tell me what you feel before you start deciding what you think it means."

That was enough to make Sio stop treating the examination like an excuse for conversation.

Arch dipped two fingers into the water and rested them lightly against the inside of his wrist. For a moment Sio noticed only the coolness left on his skin, then something deeper responded and his fingers tightened against the table before he could stop them.

The last two days had given him enough unfamiliar sensations that he had begun separating them by instinct. Claim I carried a strange sense of distance whenever it stirred, as though part of whatever he had connected himself to existed somewhere impossibly far from the room around him. The paths were different, sharper and much closer, gathering behind his eyes before movement began arranging itself across the world.

This belonged to neither.

Arch felt the tension in Sio’s wrist and stopped changing the pressure. He allowed him enough time to work through the sensation before asking what had changed.

"The thing from yesterday is back." Sio moved his free hand toward his chest, then abandoned the gesture because he still couldn’t give the feeling a useful location. "When you examined me at the Nexus, something reacted. I assumed it might be the Scar because you were doing something the scanner hadn’t done. Now I’m not sure."

A ripple formed near Sio’s side of the bowl and travelled toward Arch.

Sio watched it while searching for a better explanation. "Claim I doesn’t feel like this. Whenever that reacts, there’s always some sense that whatever I’m connected to isn’t entirely here. This feels close enough that I keep wanting to point somewhere inside myself, even though that doesn’t really explain anything."

"It’s more useful than pretending certainty." Arch shifted the placement of his fingers while keeping his attention divided between Sio and the water. "Don’t name it yet. Tell me whether the feeling itself changes."

The response returned, carrying something that unsettled Sio more than pain would have: familiarity. He had never met Arch before yesterday. Nothing about the man’s face stirred some forgotten childhood encounter, and Sio had no memory waiting to contradict him. Yet whatever moved beneath his awareness carried none of that unfamiliarity. It responded with the ease of something that considered Arch already known.

Sio remained quiet longer than before, and Arch read the difference in him without interrupting.

"This is going to sound ridiculous," Sio eventually said, "but whatever is responding doesn’t feel like it’s trying to understand you. It feels like I’m the only one in this room who needed an introduction."

Arch’s fingers became very still. He studied Sio, then the water, before withdrawing his hand entirely. The ripples continued for several seconds after the contact ended, while something in Arch’s manner shifted from an examiner searching for a result to a man testing a suspicion he did not want to speak aloud.

Without explaining himself, Arch crossed to one of the lower cabinets and moved several boxes aside. He reached toward the back and withdrew a narrow wooden case worn pale around its corners. Unlike most things in the study, it had been stored carefully enough that almost no dust had gathered along the lid.

When he returned, Sio saw the faded writing.

S. ELORAN

Every other question disappeared beneath that one.

"That’s Dad’s."

"It belonged to him." Arch rested his fingertips over the old lettering before opening the case. "Silas left enough things with me that I eventually stopped trying to decide what he meant to give away and what he simply forgot to collect."

Inside lay a small oval of dark metal, an old transparent plate cracked through one corner and several folded examination records. Sio wanted to touch everything at once. The sudden change in Arch’s concentration convinced him to keep his hands where they were.

Arch set the dark metal beside the bowl and repeated the contact against Sio’s wrist.

The response returned almost immediately.

A ripple crossed the water while that same strange familiarity moved through Sio. Arch shifted farther along his wrist, keeping Silas’s old object close to the bowl, and the sensation followed with enough consistency that Sio’s unease began matching the concentration building in Arch’s face. When the contact moved higher along his forearm, the response strengthened instead of fading.

By then, the repeated response had shifted Arch’s attention away from confirming that something had reacted and toward testing whatever conclusion was beginning to form in his head.

Sio watched him work through it before speaking. "You’ve stopped wondering whether this is real. You’re comparing it to something."

Arch kept his attention on the water, his thumb resting lightly against Sio’s arm. "I’m trying to make sure recognition isn’t becoming expectation. There’s someone I knew well enough that finding anything resembling him here would make me very capable of seeing what I want to see."

Sio’s eyes moved toward the case carrying his father’s name, and the implication quieted him.

"So every time this reacts, you’re comparing whatever is inside me to Dad."

Arch finally met his eyes. The caution there had become personal now, stripped of the professional distance he had maintained throughout the morning. "Yes. And so far, I dislike how often the answer agrees with me."

He tried once more, this time raising his hand toward the center of Sio’s chest and waiting before making contact. Sio understood the pause and gave a small nod.

The moment Arch touched him, warmth moved outward from somewhere Sio could not reach. There was no pain, no System message appeared, and Claim I remained quiet. The sensation simply reached toward Arch with an ease that did not belong to Sio.

Arch’s breath caught, and his hand remained there for another second before he slowly withdrew it. Sio expected concern, perhaps even another round of cautious testing. Instead Arch looked down at Silas’s old case while disbelief gave way to something much more complicated. His thumb brushed across his mouth as though he were trying to contain the reaction, but a quiet laugh escaped anyway, carrying affection, irritation and something painfully close to relief.

"That bastard."

Sio stared at him.

There was only one person Arch could possibly mean.

He shifted forward in the chair, giving Arch enough time to meet his eyes before speaking. "You used something that belonged to my father, found a reaction inside me that apparently knows you better than I do, and now you’re laughing like Dad has managed to irritate you nineteen years after dying. I understand why you don’t want to guess, but you can’t expect me to hear that and simply move on."

Arch’s amusement remained, although grief had settled beside it. He closed the old case carefully before answering. "I don’t expect you to move on. I expect you to wait until I’m confident that what I recognized is actually there. Silas was my closest friend. That makes me exactly the wrong person to trust the first answer that looks like him."

That changed the weight of the refusal. Sio had spent most of the previous day protecting his own unanswered questions from people he had only just met. Arch wasn’t hiding this because he enjoyed possessing information first. He had found something connected closely enough to Silas that being wrong about it frightened him.

Sio still hated waiting, but the anger went out of the question before he could push further. He dragged his notebook closer instead and made a small mark beside one of yesterday’s entries. "Fine. For the record, though, the phrase ’that bastard’ created expectations your caution is now failing to satisfy."

A little of the tension left Arch’s face as he began putting the older equipment away. "That part wasn’t scientific."